Technology Makes Us Escapist; The Cult Of the Mind

By Mark Dery

Published: September 28, 1997

They came from cyberspace, sporting ''My Favorite Martian'' haircuts and ''Star Trek''-inspired arm patches that read ''Heaven's Gate Away Team.'' The saucer-worshiping ''cybergeeks'' in the Heaven's Gate cult were ''never truly of this earth'' in the words of Andrea Peyser, a columnist with The New York Post.

To many in the media, the cultists who committed suicide in an attempt to rendezvous with the U.F.O. they believed was lurking behind the Hale-Bopp comet were an object lesson in the evils of the Internet, that Black Lagoon of mind-control cults and conspiracy theories. They were made-to-order poster children for the anxiety many feel in the face of runaway technological and social change -- inscrutable, unpredictable machines that crash without warning, voice-mail hells whose endless menus never include a human being, and so forth. There was a revenge-on-the-nerds subtext to much of the Heaven's Gate coverage, a mixture of old-fashioned anti-intellectualism and a new-found resentment toward the self-styled ''digital elite'' surfing Alvin Toffler's Third Wave.

But there was an element of cultural denial in the widespread insistence that the Heaven's Gaters were nerds, techies, geeks -- in short, not like the rest of us, who presumably know the difference between a ball of dirty ice hurtling through space and an alien mother ship traveling incognito. The truth, in this case, isn't so much out there as right here: the Heaven's Gate cult was a fun-house-mirror exaggeration of ourselves as a wired society.

For example, Marshall Applewhite's contempt for the flesh and the mundane world is pervasive among computer scientists, hackers and others in the advance guard of digital culture. Of course, the late 20th century holds no patent on body loathing; stripped of its ''Star Trek'' jargon, Applewhite's credo sounds a lot like Gnosticism, a movement that flourished in the second century A.D. Fiercely dualistic, Gnosticism reviled the body as a ''corpse with senses'' and taught that freedom from the shackles of matter lay not in faith but in self-denial and esoteric knowledge. Despite zealous efforts to suppress it, Gnosticism left its stamp on Judeo-Christian thought.

But there's no need to look to the second century for parallels to the cultists' belief that the body is just so much hardware, piloted by a mind whose destiny lies on what the Heaven's Gaters called the Evolutionary Level Above Human. In ''The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe,'' Robert Jastrow speculates that, one day soon, a scientist will ''tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer.'' Emancipating our minds from ''the weaknesses of the mortal flesh'' will transform us into a race of disembodied intellects, writes Jastrow, as evolutionarily suited for life in the future ''as man is designed for life on the African savanna.''

Jastrow, director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, is no flake. Nor is Hans Moravec, who heads the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Carnegie-Mellon University. He goes even further, imagining the fusion of Jastrow's ''downloaded'' consciousnesses into a ''community mind'' that would spread through-out the cosmos, transforming matter into mind through some form of data conversion. In Nerdvana, all is cerebration; the ''mind'' half of the mind-body dualism will vanquish its much-detested opposite.

Like Applewhite's vision of ''shedding the vehicle'' and beaming up to that great ''Enterprise'' in the sky, the science-fiction dream of ''downloading'' our minds is essentially a religious one, sheathed in technobabble -- Gnosticism with rocket fins. In Grant Fjermedal's ''Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines,'' the computer scientist Charles P. Lecht asserts that ''when we do become mind. . .we will be given a boost, out of the physical, and from there into -- where else? -- the spiritual.''

Of course, Lecht, Moravec and Jastrow are hardly household names. But the neo-Gnosticism that they share with Applewhite and his followers is creeping into our cultural conversation about who we are and where we're going as a high-tech society. For example, John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a computer users' advocacy group, has written that cyberspace is ''the new home of Mind,'' a separate reality fashioned from ''thought itself.'' In his ''Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,'' written after Congress passed the much-reviled Communciations Decency Act of 1996, Barlow suggests that cyberspace secede from the physical world. Barlow proclaims: ''We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.''

In like mind, George Gilder, a breathless rhapsodist of technological progress, celebrates the ''overthrow of matter'' and the ''exaltation of mind'' by information technologies. He ends ''Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology'' with a homily that reconciles our national faith in science and technology with our Puritanical distrust of the flesh. ''Overthrowing matter,'' writes Gilder, ''humanity also escapes from the traps and compulsions of pleasure into a higher morality of spirit'' -- a line that would have gladdened the heart of Marshall Applewhite.